BERKELEY — Since
2000 UC Berkeley professor Richard Muller has taught
his popular course "Physics for Future Presidents," relating
important concepts in physics to global events and
issues. As webcasts and podcasts of Physics 10 have
become available online — on
webcast.berkeley.edu, iTunes, Google Video, and now
YouTube — he realized he was reaching far more
minds each semester than the 500 potential Commanders
in Chief in his Pimentel lecture hall. At least in
theory.

At a session in March 2006, Muller put the question
to his students in cyberspace: "From Walla Walla
to Timbuktu," if you're watching or listening,
send word.

The first e-mail response came from Kansas City,
Mo. It's been followed by hundreds of other messages — at
latest count from 72 countries and from 48 of the
50 states (South Dakota and Arkansas, where are you?). "I
was just listening to your first of three lectures
titled 'Quantum,'" wrote an NGO worker stationed
in Bamako, Mali. "Consider yourself contacted
from Timbuktu. I plan to be there later this month,
and I assure you I will have your lecture playing
on my MP3 player as I plod away by camel." (See
excerpts
of some of those e-mails).

Richard Muller (Peg
Skorpinski photo)

Some wrote from war zones. A U.S. Marine who had
just completed three tours in the infantry, wrote
to say that while based at Camp Habbaniyah, in central
Iraq, he had "listened to just about every 'Physics
for Future Presidents.' If you ever see Alex Filippenko
or Joshua Bloom" — two Berkeley astronomers
whose lectures are available online — "tell
them I loved their lectures, too," he added.

Another arrived with the subject line "Thank
you from a grateful sailor in Iraq." The author
was John David Shelton, a member of a Navy counter-IED
(improvised explosive device) roadside taskforce,
who wrote to say that the "Physics for Future
Presidents" lectures "have been a lifeline
for me."

We recently contacted Shelton to ask him to elaborate.
Now a chief petty officer at the Pensacola Naval
Air Station, where he instructs helicopter and aircraft
crew, Shelton wrote back. After explaining how he
downloaded the physics series to his iPod before
leaving for Iraq, he went on:

My experiences listening to his lectures
over there were, for lack of a better word, otherworldly.
We would often ride patrols between Baghdad and
Ramadi and I would listen to his lectures in one
ear and the HUMVEE com system in the other. Once
I was out on mission and did the same while manning
a .50-caliber machine-gun turret, watching over
a goat herder's field, where insurgents were suspected
of passing through a week prior.

John David Shelton

Now imagine this scene: I haven't showered in
over 36 hours, temperatures are hitting near 110
degrees, I'm as filthy as I can ever remember being
because of the blowing dust, a goat herder and
his family tending their goats pass by our vehicle — once
in the morning and once during the evening, going
in the other direction, each time waving a white
flag to make sure they aren't accidentally shot — and
I've got physics going in one of my ears. Back
on the base, I would take a cot outside at night
and use my night-vision goggles to look at stars
and constellations while listening to Professor
Muller….

Even though I consider myself
a smarter-than-average individual, I was never
able to attend college. So I'm mostly self-educated
in anything beyond the high school level. I've
always enjoyed science — [science
writer] Carl Sagan and [Nobelist and physics popularizer]
Richard Feynman being my two heroes, so to speak.
And now, after listening to Professor Muller's
lectures, he ranks very close to them.

It's impossible for me to pin down exactly what
I learned listening to his lectures. Some of it
I already knew, some of it clarified concepts I
was vague on previously, but a good portion of
it was completely new, and it was all enjoyable.
Professor Muller calls his course 'Physics for
Future Presidents,' I assume in order to grab the
attention of undergrads signing up for their requisite
science course. But I feel a more appropriate title
would be 'Physics for Useful Citizens.' What he
teaches is, to me and I'm sure to him, too, the
basics needed to be an informed, critical thinking
citizen of our country….

I'm just blown away when I think that I have
received an Ivy League education in basic physics
for free! And not just because it's free either;
even if I had the money, what are the chances I
could make it into Berkeley and then make it into
his class? Probably pretty slim.

The professor responds

Course-casting
by the numbers

UC Berkeley first began webcasting entire academic courses in 2001. Since the October launch of the university's initial offering of courses and events on YouTube, "the
numbers have gone through the roof," reports
Richard Bloom, course-cast administrator for
Educational Technology Services
(ETS). "We
were all pretty amazed at the speed that it
took off and the number of views."

YouTube offers
free access to more than 400 lectures for eight
UC Berkeley courses — in
physics, biology, information technology,
chemistry, engineering, and peace and conflict
studies. Total hits during the first two
weeks (Oct. 3-17, 2007): 859,000+.

Campus podcasts and webcasts on other platforms
include:• Berkeley
on iTunes U: 2.3
million downloads of course videos since
launch in April '06
• webcast.berkeley.edu: In
2006, 10.3 million MP3 audio downloads from course archives. The service
offers 45 fall 2007 courses online, in webcast (audio and video) and/or
podcast (audio-only) format, and some 150 additional courses dating
back as far as 2001.

Professor Muller calls Shelton's missive "one
of the most rewarding letters I've ever received — the
fact that I can touch people around the world in
such distant locations, working under such extreme
conditions, and affect their lives…."

As for Shelton's theory about the course title,
the professor puts it differently: "I named
it 'Physics
for Future Presidents' to alert students that
it's different from anything they've experienced
or expected." For "non-math
people," physics is often presented in a way
that makes them feel inferior, Muller says. "I've
had similar experience trying to take a music class.
If they discover I have difficulty singing in key,
I get snide remarks, I feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
And yet I love music."

With that object lesson in mind, he works to make
his presentations on matter, motion, space, and time
engaging and relevant. "I imagine that one day,
when one of them is president, I'll say 'why didn't
I teach that student X'?'…. So each lecture
is focused seriously on what I'd want future president
to know."

(Presidential hopefuls, take note: Muller has written
a trade book — titled (what else?) Physics
for Future Presidents — that he reports
will be published by Norton in early 2008. "It's
designed to be read by the candidates," he says,
and ideally as well by journalists, equipping them
to pose challenging and serious questions on our
energy future, nuclear weapons, global warming and
other matters that have much to do with physics.)

"People make fun of Internet education. But
I'm in the thick of it and am seeing the response
around the world," Muller notes. "The mandate
of the university is to educate; that's why we are
here. We're a public university and we want to educate
as many as possible, so we're big. Yet there's a
limit to how many one university can accept."

Online course-casting changes the equation. "People
interested in serious education can find the UC lectures….," says
Muller. "They don't get course credit, but they're
doing it anyway — and to me that makes these
among my best students. They really want to learn."

As for the correspondence hitting his inbox, "I
used to answer every one," he says — but
admits he is rapidly losing ground. "I'm 156
behind right now. I'm realizing it's going to swamp
me."